January 19, 2007

Funny. He wants you to laugh. [ADDED: Hope the link works now. MORE: Actually, the Times is making it really hard to link to the video. Go here and then look for the video in the sidebar.]

AND: Here's Buchwald's last column, written to be published after his death. He has surprisingly little to say about death, perhaps nothing at all. He says a little something about life and about dying. He made a decision to forgo dialysis, and he says that decision was his and it was "healthy." He doesn't expound, and I suppose he means for us to find humor of this use of the word "healthy" when the decision would kill him. Not having dialysis was utterly unhealthy, but the decision could still be healthy. A decision is something that occurs in your mind.

I think Art meant the word "healthy" to mean "the right decision for him". And I think it was, since he actually got many more months of life than the doctors had originally predicted. Doing things his own way was something that he specialized in throughout his entire life and career, and I'm going to miss his presence, very much.

Now that I've stopped chuckling (too mean of me, but what's with those big car sketches in the background, anyway?), here's a video having to do with the recording of the actual original version of the song that struck Buchwald:

Sorry to go on about this, but I'm saddened by Buchwald's passing, uplifted by his approach, and utterly charmed by the fact he was pondering this particular song enough to have made a point of including it in his own, final column.

I can very much see Art Buchwald or H L Mencken or e e cummings nodding in appreciation at the remark:

"I could see that, if not exactly disgruntled, he was very far from being gruntled."

This same Wodehouse fellow so understood the emotionally stunted life of the average Englishman:

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies."

That notwithstanding, I should warn adherents to this fine blog that I fully intend, soon, to whisk our esteemed hostess, Prof Althouse, to some seductive Arab desert encampment and thence to parley some extra-ordinary Anglo-American relations.